Exorcism And The Shaman’s Apprentice

I’ve been thinking about what to say about this much-discussed Atlantic piece on exorcism, which is why I haven’t posted on it yet. As regular readers know, I take this phenomenon very seriously. A friend’s wife is under the care of an exorcist now, in fact. Take a look at these excerpts:

Perhaps as a result, demand for exorcisms—the Catholic Church’s antidote to demonic possession—seems to be growing as well. Though the Church does not keep official statistics, the exorcists I interviewed for this article attest to fielding more pleas for help every year.

Father Vincent Lampert, the official exorcist for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, told me in early October that he’d received 1,700 phone or email requests for exorcisms in 2018, by far the most he’s ever gotten in one year. Father Gary Thomas—a priest whose training as an exorcist in Rome was documented in The Rite, a book published in 2009 and made into a movie in 2011—said that he gets at least a dozen requests a week. Several other priests reported that without support from church staff and volunteers, their exorcism ministries would quickly swallow up their entire weekly schedules.

The Church has been training new exorcists in Chicago, Rome, and Manila. Thomas told me that in 2011 the U.S. had fewer than 15 known Catholic exorcists. Today, he said, there are well over 100. Other exorcists I spoke with put the number between 70 and 100. (Again, no official statistics exist, and most dioceses conceal the identity of their appointed exorcist, to avoid unwanted attention.)

I remember asking an exorcist once how he convinced people that they needed his services. He told me, in a quiet voice, “By the time they find me, they don’t need convincing.”

More:

Catholic priests use a process called discernment to determine whether they’re dealing with a genuine case of possession. In a crucial step, the person requesting an exorcism must undergo a psychiatric evaluation with a mental-health professional. The vast majority of cases end there, as many of the individuals claiming possession are found to be suffering from psychiatric issues such as schizophrenia or a dissociative disorder, or to have recently gone off psychotropic medication.

Actual exorcisms are rare. Here, I think, is the most interesting thing about the Atlantic piece. “Louisa” is Louisa Muskovits, a Washington woman who opens up about to writer Mike Mariani about her struggles with the demonic:

According to Catholic doctrine, in order to take possession of a person in the first place, demons rely on doorways—what the priest in Orlando warned Louisa about. These can include things like habitual sin and family curses—in which an act of violence or iniquity committed by one generation manifests itself in subsequent generations. But the priests I spoke with kept coming back, over and over, to two particular doorways.

Nearly every Catholic exorcist I spoke with cited a history of abuse—in particular, sexual abuse—as a major doorway for demons. Thomas said that as many as 80 percent of the people who come to him seeking an exorcism are sexual-abuse survivors. According to these priests, sexual abuse is so traumatic that it creates a kind of “soul wound,” as Thomas put it, that makes a person more vulnerable to demons.

The exorcists—to be clear—aren’t saying sexual abuse torments people to such an extent that they come to believe they’re possessed; the exorcists contend that abuse fosters the conditions for actual demonic possession to take hold. But from a secular standpoint, the link to sexual abuse helps explain why someone might become convinced that he or she is being menaced by something sinister and overpowering.

The correlation with abuse struck me as eerie, given the scandals that have rocked the Church. But it doesn’t seem to answer the “why now?” question behind exorcism’s comeback; no evidence exists to suggest that child abuse has increased. The second doorway—an interest in the occult—might offer at least a partial explanation.

Most of the exorcists I interviewed said they believed that demonic possession was becoming more common—and they cited a resurgence in magic, divination, witchcraft, and attempts to communicate with the dead as a primary cause. According to Catholic teaching, engaging with the occult involves accessing parts of the spiritual realm that may be inhabited by demonic forces. “Those practices become the engine that allows the demon to come in,” Thomas said.

In recent years, journalists and academics have documented a renewed interest in magic, astrology, and witchcraft, primarily among Millennials. “The occult is a substitution for God,” Thomas said. “People want to take shortcuts, and the occult is all about power and knowledge.”

In my own informal investigation of this phenomenon, I have been deeply moved by the role sexual abuse plays. It has something to do with why I reacted so very strongly to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. Something about sexual abuse puts cracks into the foundation of one’s psyche through which evil discarnate intelligences can migrate. I don’t know how it works, and it’s certainly not the moral fault of the victim. But (and this is important): because we cannot come up with a satisfying explanation for why this happens does not mean that we can ignore that it happens.

As I wrote in the must-read third update to this transgender post, trans writer Andrea Long Chu’s description of “sissy porn” and how it can provoke transgenderism in susceptible viewers is a close approximation of how demonic possession works. The assault on the personality, including prying open the crack of a person’s sense of self-loathing, and convincing the victim to long for relief through surrender to the dominant force trying to possess him — and ultimately craving for the annihilation of the personality through total submission.

It’s not only sexual abuse, though. According to the information the exorcist has gained from his work so far, my friend’s wife was initially in danger because (unknown to her), her grandfather back in the old country was heavily involved with the occult. She suffered as a teenager from severe depression, and attempted suicide. This gave the evil spirits an opportunity. Believe me, the things that woman and those who love her have been going through as they struggle with this would demolish any strictly materialist explanation.

For those who become possessed without having involved themselves with the occult, the key seems to be some combination of self-hatred and trauma. But there is mystery too. Not everyone who despises himself and/or is traumatized, sexually or otherwise, becomes possessed.

As you read in the story, Louisa was traumatized sexually in childhood, and also turned to dabbling in the occult as an adult (e.g., Ouija board, crystals). Read the whole thing.

For some reason I find myself thinking now about one of the most intriguing conversations of my life. It was on a bus last year. I found myself sitting next to a clean-cut young white man who appeared to be in his early 30s. We fell into easy conversation. He told me a long story about how he had been raised in a prosperous family, but was not satisfied with what upper middle class materialism had to offer. After college he went to live among Indians — I can’t remember where or who they were — and apprenticed himself to a shaman.

He spent years learning about plants, and plant spirits. He did not talk at all like the New Age dabbler I expected him to be. This man was deep, and very serious. He told me that had I met him only a short time ago, I would have seen someone who appeared very different. His shaman told him to leave and to return to the world. His path, said the shaman, was not there with the native people. When I met him, the young man was returning to his parents to work with his father.

As I read these last two paragraphs, I can imagine that you are rolling your eyes at them (well, not you, Franklin Evans, but everybody else). But I’m telling you, this man was not remotely spacey or woo-woo. He spoke with the quiet conviction of a physician. I remember him telling me how much he learned from immersing himself in the world of the Indians under the tutelage of the shaman. He said that he thought he knew so much about the world, growing up as a privileged, educated Westerner, but in fact he was blind to so much reality. I recall that he was somewhat amused by what he took to be the arrogance of Western, industrialized, educated people, and their reflexive materialism. He told me that the kind of people I call WEIRDoes (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic people) get themselves into all kinds of trouble with their naive dismissal of the spiritual realm.

What was so interesting about it, in retrospect, was that the young man wasn’t angry, or evangelistic about his beliefs, or anything like that. He was certainly no Christian. I suspect he was some sort of animist. He had about him a gently ironic spirit, as if he appreciated how bizarre his history was. I really liked that about him. His demeanor reminded me of the stance my father and all those country men took towards rich city folks — lawyers and doctors usually — who would come up to the West Feliciana swamp to deer hunt on winter weekends. The city men carried themselves like they knew everything about the woods, but in fact they knew very little. My dad and his friends didn’t make fun of them, and in fact they tried to help them. But mostly they got a kick out of the distance between what those wealthy, well-educated, accomplished worldly men thought they knew about the world, and the way the world actually worked.

The shaman’s apprentice spoke of materialism as if it were a kind of fundamentalism. Which it is.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 75 comments

75 Responses to Exorcism And The Shaman’s Apprentice

An excellent discussion is developing here. My small contribution to it requires an explicit acknowledgement: I know what I know from personal experience, and what I know the best is that I don’t have an explanation for much of it that can comply with rational analysis. However you (general) choose to phrase your thoughts here, I’m not going to argue with it. I respect the utterly subjective nature of this. I share in a general skepticism about it, even when the evidence is corroborated by people other than the person reporting it. I know full well that the last mistake I’ll ever make is taking any part of it for granted.

Elijah, the cost to me of my knowledge comes in two “coinages”. The first and foremost to me was the assault on my sanity. To this day, I have to make a significant effort to set aside certain things, because from my point of view they can only be safely examined outside of the boundaries of sanity. The second was physical. I prefer to not go into detail about that in a public forum.

The sanity reference is a critical one, in my experience in dealing and coping with my own seeking. Elijah, you and I may not fully understand or agree with something like “Christian demons”, but I do encourage you to look at it from the sanity aspect: for humans, putting a label on the unknown is not an attempt to explain it. It is an attempt to be armed against it. We are well advised to fear something, but we must then find a way to deal with it beyond the paralysis fear can bring. It needs a cognitive structure. Sometimes the first label we try doesn’t work. We move on to another label, or perish.

You might be surprised to learn that my practices and my spiritual seeking are sometimes feared by my siblings in faith. Having a common lingo doesn’t give them enough cognitive structure. Before I thought to have a label, they “gifted” me with one: chaos mage. I dip into the maelstrom, deliberately, dangerously, but when I return I sometimes can offer things of great value to fellow believers. I call my practices shamanic. I am not a shaman, I never apprenticed to one. It’s a handy label to use, nothing more.

Knowing that there’s just a lot going on is the height of wisdom in all of this. I personally had to learn that the hard way, and relearn it a couple of times before it stuck.

I was going to argue over how it’s all the “same thing”, gods and demons and whatnot. However, it comes back to what I said about labels and cognitive structure. I personally don’t care what you call it. If you are injured or in danger, that’s always enough.

I applaud your corrective criticism concerning quantum physics. I have a bit to add to it, and your further reaction is gratefully anticipated.

If you read my most recent previous post, addressed to Elijah, you’ll see that I obtain the label “chaos mage”. I won’t go into the background on that usage. As Inigo Montoya* once said: Let me explain… no. It would take too long. Let me summarize. 😀

A key point in my spiritual path, where I was able to confidently step away from the brink of insanity, was reading the essays of Carl Jung and the writings of Joseph Campbell. I was beginning to notice common “themes” across varying religions and belief systems, and I wanted to ask the why and how questions. Jung’s collective unconscious and Campbell’s universal hero make perfect sense as starting points for answers. Much later, as I read about quantum physics, and over time as I followed further developments in it, I was struck by a possible link to Jung and Campbell. When they write about shared beliefs as expressed in themes in storytelling, they don’t even try to posit how they are conveyed over distances and time. Ancient aliens doesn’t do it for me (nor should it for anyone). The vocabulary of quantum mechanics made increasingly good sense. I stopped scoffing at the “chaos” in my label, and started to embrace it from the cognitive structure of physics.

I certainly hypothesize that some type of particle, or combination of known particles, might begin to explain that conveyance. I stop there (except in my private thoughts and wondering), knowing that the technology to detect and measure them is very unlikely to appear in my lifetime. I do suggest that it will appear at some point, and we may very well find a way to measure and describe Jung’s collective unconscious.

* In case you or other readers don’t get that, it’s a reference to the movie The Princess Bride.

I would be absolutely aghast and instantly skeptical if someone accused my dear granddad of meddling in evil and bringing on a family curse. Lying is, after all, one of the hallmarks of the devil. Maybe the purpose was to sow disharmony and doubt within the woman’s family.

I had an experience with the demonic when I was a near adolescent, but didn’t recognize it as such until I became a Christian. I was being tempted into evil, and it was so strangely alluring that I initially listened and tried what was suggested, which was cruelty to an animal. However, it appalled me so much that I mentally ran the other way, and never tried such again.

My other encounters, some years later, were through the gateway of sexual deviance, and resulted in far more overt manifestations, and were not able to be rejected as easily – in fact, being tormented by them until after becoming a Christian, and asking the Lord’s intercession.

The Hostage to the Devil cases as reported, mirror too much of what happened to me, to be fanciful fabrications.

I was interested in the updated version, which conveyed what had happened later on, to victims and exorcists alike.

As for science, it’s a methodology for exploration of reality, the understanding of which will always be incomplete. There is a reductionist subset practiced which is really an exclusionist religion of its own, that is used instead by some persons to deny reality, reducing it to where consequences of its immoral use will be unpredictable and even harmful.

Just kidding. I’ve actually had a couple of people who I know in real life and consider very down-to-earth, unsuperstitious people, claim to have observed phenomena that could not be explained by natural processes. They were science people, so not inclined to reach for supernatural explanations. They just couldn’t explain those events naturally. I haven’t witnessed these things myself, so I don’t make any judgment calls.

In regards to proving that a supernatural event occurred, or disproving one, I think that one should always bear in mind that the scientific method depends on reproducibility. Things fall down, and they do so over and over again. Because these observations are repeatable, we can test them, vary conditions, and so on, and tease out the phenomenon of “gravity” that “causes” things to fall “down” (towards the earth, but let’s not get semantic here).

A supernatural event, on the other hand, is, by its nature, not reproducible. You can’t retest it, control the conditions, etc. [Jesus, could you just please rise from the dead again, while my research assistant watches? And, could you also do it after I hook up these wires, just to see what your body is doing when you are rising from the dead. Great, do that three or four more times, just to make sure….]

The practice of science requires beginning with a belief that all phenomena can be explained without resorting to the supernatural. That is, adhering to the belief that there are never supernatural causes for observed phenomena is a precondition of doing science, and isn’t falsifiable (ie is not itself science). Being unable to explain/examine/repeat a claimed supernatural event does not preclude a scientist declaring that there must have been a natural cause. He/she just didn’t have a chance to engage their instruments in order to investigate the cause. Ah well, maybe next time….

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

Demonic possession and oppression is absolutely real, and I’ve seen instances of it. But for those who trust in Christ, though it is serious stuff, it is not something to run from in terror.

The remedy is to discover the lies by which the demonic gains access to enter to our lives, and to turn away from these.

For those who can’t—or are reluctant to—reach out to an exorcist, I can’t recommend highly enough the book by (Roman Catholic) Neal Lozano, “Unbound: A Practical Guide to Deliverance.”

I don’t know what it would take to make me believe it. But I think if I were a demon, I would do more than make people talk funny and make faces. Plus, I would do more than throw an object across a table. Maybe set someone’s hair on fire, or cause the walls of a room to turn into melting slime? I can think of a lot more I would do than has been described. This reminds me of the “miraculous cures”- yeah, people swear by them but no one’s ever seen someone grow a leg back after it’s been amputated.

I think Thomas Tucker has a point, and an interesting thought experiment. I’d go big or go home, and do things like:

* Possess the head of a conservative news organization, and use propaganda to convince Christians that a serial adulter was their great defender.

* Whisper in the ear of the heads of a major religious order to bury evidence of wrongdoing, then get a reporter to find it.

* Possess someone, get then to found a televangelist network, promote the prosperity gospel, and live high on the proceeds! Finish with a major financial and sex scandal to really drive the point home.

Why? Demons are supposed to be the enemies of God, so making his organization look bad seems efficient. Plus it doesn’t leave any demonic fingerprints for the skeptics to detect.

[NFR: I find it so tiresome when atheists assume that God (or demons) must not exist, because none of them behave precisely the way the atheists think they should behave. — RD]

Another route for the demonic to enter is surely alcohol and drug intoxication. Alcohol especially can easily create a blackout state, in which the drunkard loses all short-term memory. In his intoxicated state, the victim is able to still function and believes he is acting perfectly normally, though in fact he is acting truly only in the moment. The next day, or week, he awakens to discover a portion of lost time — an evening, a few days, even weeks.

In this vacuum of conscious memory it is common for the alcoholic’s soul to be inhabited by a demonic entity. Nothing else can explain the tragic and baffling cases where the alcoholic awakens in jail for having committed some horrific murder or shocking violent crime, which they have absolutely no memory of having committed. Having studied the phenomena of blackouts, about which little real research has been done, I’m convinced that nothing else but demonic possession can explain these cases of sheer malevolence from people who are considered more or less decent when sober.

Rod, I am a Hindu and find it very funny that materialists expect the creator to oblige them and show Him/Herself in a petridish. The attitude that anything which cannot be understood by human intellect must not exist is just deification of the intellect. Without humility, no religious or spiritual understanding is possible. Modern science and the schooling system actually encourages just this kind of materialistic thinking. I have seen plenty of people professing to believe in different religions lack basic belief or conviction in their religion because of this attitude. Funnily enough, they believe in the various hypotheses of theoretical physics without any particular understanding of high level mathematics.

[NFR: I find it so tiresome when atheists assume that God (or demons) must not exist, because none of them behave precisely the way the atheists think they should behave. — RD]

Atheists don’t assume God or demons don’t exist because they don’t behave precisely the way atheists think they should. They don’t believe they exist because they don’t see any credible evidence for their existence.

The bizarre behavior of these supposed beings is just icing on the cake. Sorry, but I just find it funny that an all-powerful benevolent perfect being would think the best way to communicate with his subjects is with light shows. Or that demons have nothing better to do than levitate people and talk in gibberish.

If God is a person, and we’re formed in his image, then can’t we assume some comprehensibility of behavior? I would think that even saying something is good or evil assumes some comprehensibility.

It’s the shell game of Theism. God can be known with reason, and acts comprehensibly. Until he doesn’t or some theological dead end is reached, and then “the ways of God are strange” and “his ways are not our ways”, etc.

[NFR: I find it so tiresome when atheists assume that God (or demons) must not exist, because none of them behave precisely the way the atheists think they should behave. — RD]

I’m sure there must be some atheists that assume such, but in my experience the great many of us† don’t believe in your god for the same reason you don’t believe in Thor‡.

That said, you shouldn’t confuse mockery with serious argument.
________
†Technically speaking, I’m agnostic. But for practical purposes, my behavior is indistinguishable from that of an atheist. Which is to say, I don’t assert that gods are impossible, I just don’t believe in any of them.
‡”Well, it’s not like I have any reason to believe, and you have to admit, doesn’t it all sound a bit silly?”

While I have never directly encountered a case of possession one of my language instructors at the Missionary Training Center, who served in the Dominican Republic, related to us his experience of participating in an exorcism. The possessed had resorted to a local ‘healer’ for a cure to an illness.
Given the witness of the demons infesting Legion
that begged to be cast out into the swine it is reasonable to argue that just having a physical body is pleasurable for the unenbodied and they respond to it often more like joy riding teenagers who have manged to boost some guys Ferrari, rather than dedicated car thieves trying to make a buck.

[I’m sure there must be some atheists that assume such, but in my experience the great many of us† don’t believe in your god for the same reason you don’t believe in Thor‡. ]

I suspect that we might have similar reasons not to believe in Thor, whether you happen to believe that God created the universe, or in the big bang, or both! If time/space/matter popped into being out of nothing then the only beliefs aligning with a God creating out of nothing (to my knowledge) are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Deism. All other religions have a god or gods creating within space and time that have existed from eternity past.

If time/space/matter popped into being out of nothing then the only beliefs aligning with a God creating out of nothing (to my knowledge) are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Deism.

That requires generous readings of the relevant texts, and if we’re going to be generous, then I see no reason to limit said generosity to one set of beliefs over all others.

That said, trying to tie Christianity to the Big Bang Theory is as silly as trying to tie Christianity to a flat earth, a 6000 year old earth, a geo-centric universe, or any “god of the gaps” nonsense. It only works so long as people don’t learn more.

That requires generous readings of the relevant texts, and if we’re going to be generous, then I see no reason to limit said generosity to one set of beliefs over all others.

Yes, Genesis does not say that there was nothing before Creation. It says the spirit of God “moved upon the face of the waters,” which means there were waters. Waters are not nothing. It seems that the biblical writers were assuming that water is the world’s default state — it’s what fills in whatever isn’t land, after all — and that “the earth was without form, and void” in the sense no habitable territory had yet been crafted out of this primordial state.

Then after bringing light, God created a “firmament” with the waters both below AND above it (kind of a wrong detail there), and then he created dry land, so that instead of primordial “waters” we had earth and sea. Thus, something resembling a world that humans could live in began to emerge. It’s not a bad story, but it’s not at all the Big Bang.

I should probably avoid apologetics on the Internet, as I’m not great of it and even if I were it’s typically not the best venue.

At any rate I wasn’t trying to tie the big bang theory to Christianity, just trying to find a point of common ground to reflect (one way) in which I find Christianity to be reasonable, rather than simply going ‘well Thor’s imaginary, and all of those other gods and beliefs are wrong, but Christianity, that’s the one that’s real’.

I’ll leave it there as this isn’t the best place to have an off-topic conversation, but I’ll read any responses.

One night, I was reading a forum thread about bad experiences with Ouija boards. One user wrote an anecdote of someone he/she knew. The woman was using a Ouija board, and that night, in her bed, her blankets were trying to smother and choke her alive. (it’s the demons summoned from the Ouija board). She tried to pray to God, and then the demons disappeared, and the blankets stopped strangling her. This was solid enough evidence for me to know that God exists and demons are indeed real and not something to scoff at.
If I can find the forum post, I’ll let you know.

Mom was talking to me the other night about how dangerous ouija boards are and how kids like to play with them. (I know how dangerous they are, we were talking about kids becoming “familiar” with them.)

She told me that once, on Halloween night, she and a group of her friends decided to play with an ouija board in a house where someone had died in a fire. They were in the second story of the house. Mom said that the kid who was messing with the board started muttering and his eyes got really scary, then she looked up and saw a shadow with long hair pressed against the window. She said that the window got foggy and a faceprint was on the glass, but there was no way anybody could’ve gotten up there. She said that she walked around, looking at the “shadow”, but it didn’t move. Then the alarm clock started flickering and the numbers started changing. She and everyone else in the room screamed and ran out. Then the house caught on fire shortly after, but didn’t burn down. It was an electrical fire. *cough*alarmclockflickering*cough*

Then she said that there was another time when she was in bed and all of a sudden, the blankets sucked around her really tightly and she couldn’t move, as if something was on top of her, binding the blankets. She said that she started praying and the blankets relaxed.

So that’s a warning from my mom…stay away from ouija boards, they aren’t toys!

Talking from the prospective of what most Christians deem “Heathen” and on the lines of what the first poster in this thread of reply’s have stated, having the label Chaos practitioner, and actively working with a few serious minded scientific paranormal teams and Energy workers, which at times feel the need for some “serious backup firepower’ and protection from both sides of the coin, me being on one side of that descriptive coin of “light and dark”, I have noticed that the negative spiritual activity has risen quite a bit and that rapidly over just the past few years. I find it especially in what one would see as the “normal” everyday family and most often problems have started due to curiosity by someone younger in said family wanting to “play” with various forms of Ouija/spirit boards or, other means of communicating with the deceased, not knowing it is not just a game but a tool that can successfully open doors to realms which can be very difficult to close. Having grown up with not always wanted “abilities” throughout my life, even if I don’t take the Christian approach to helping/rid unsuspecting people from attachments, regardless of how they have attracted these entities. Fighting fire with fire, often along side with open-minded Christian spiritual “warriors”, we do seem to compliment each other. Not all of us that work from what many would call the “dark side” have ill intentions, even if many would fight that notion tooth and nail. That’s fine, we’re used to it and will help regardless when asked. We see it as we are working with energy and energy has no color. What has the color is the intent of whoever is wielding that energy/power. To those that are in total disbelief of the supernatural, which I can understand if you have never been on the receiving end of said entities, I can only say. Be careful, just because you don’t believe in them, doesn’t mean they don’t believe in you. Don’t play with matches, if you’re not prepared to get burnt. These “things” can follow you and reek havoc in not only your life but the lives of your family and loved ones. You might only believe that you have for whatever reason become depressed and have sought the help from the psychiatric professionals, however, if what you have is not a “normal human” depression, their prescriptions can’t help you and you will find yourself on a downward messy spiral. Not saying every depression etc. is of demonic nature, far from it but, there are far more than what are believed to be. Also, if in doubt, seek help, we are out here both those that take a strictly Christian approach to deliverance, as well as those of us that as I wrote previously in this post, fight fire with fire. None of us will ridicule you, or think you are crazy. We will take what you tell us seriously and at face value and research to find out if we can if nothing else, eliminate that it could be some form of demonic attachment you have, regardless of where it has come from or, assist in helping you get rid of whatever attachment. You however, have to have the deep down will, determination and commitment to rid yourself of whatever entity and never open doors again. Once targeted, you are always a target and need to step away from whatever behavior has caused what is breaking you down.